It was my intention to write about fragrances on a monthly basis in 2016, but I’m afraid I rather lost the thread of that back in November. I suspect this can be forgiven. November, for my family at least, has always been The Worst Month–relatives die, addiction and depression run rampant, all sorts of good stuff–but this November was, as I think we can all agree, particularly horrid.

And so, as it happens, I have only posted 10 installments of A Year In Fragrance– which I will link to below, if you missed any and wanted to catch up. I began this project envisioning that it would be mostly fragrance reviews, but I think it ended up being more than (and perhaps a little less than) that. It was a year of scented memories, scents that I utterly loathed, and even some of my beau’s thoughts on certain fragrances. I suppose I will never get to the point where my thoughts coalesce into precise, well-thought out reviews; I’m doomed to ramble, and meandering rambles these perfumed ponderings shall doubtless remain.

For November, I will tell you that I purchased a full bottle of of Apoteker Tepe’s The Holy Mountain. Notes include “…over seven precious woods and resins along with a rare extraction of Lapsang Souchong tea smoked slowly over pinewood fires”, and if you are in the market for a smoky fragrance that smells like maybe the smoke cleared after a super-beardy wizard threw a mystical resin into a fire to conjure an ancient dragon lord or something, but the dragon flew away and the wizard has gone to bed and the fire has burned down so that only the embers are smoldering and the deeply scented, resinous smoke has seeped into all the old wooden beams in the top-most tower room where all the magical shit is locked up…well, The Holy Mountain may be the scent for you.

In December, I tried to resume the practice of “shopping my own stash”, a handy idea and phrase I first heard over at EauMG; I mean, I am of course familiar with the concept of using up your own stuff before buying new things, I just don’t think I’d hear the process called that before. Clever! Anyway, I rediscovered some samples I didn’t even realize I had, and some of them are astonishingly gorgeous, Myrrh Casati by Mona di Orio and Etat Libre d’Orange’s Attaquer le Soleil Marquis de Sade chiefly among them. At the year’s end I realize: yep, still love those churchy incense scents. Perhaps 2017 will bring new loves?